Sponsored: Tracking Beer Sales in Real Time

There are entire books and college classes that cover the challenges of supply chain management and optimization. And now there’s an app for that.

The three-tier system regulating alcohol sales and distribution can make keeping up with beer sales particularly challenging. A number of businesses offer software and apps to help. GoSpotCheck’s workforce app helps sales and management teams keep track of sales of both beer and merchandise in real time.

Mike Peasley, director of sales and distribution for High Water Brewing of Chico, California, has been using GoSpotCheck for almost a year.

“I use it to manage and track sales. We have a team of five, and it helps keep everyone on the same page,” Peasley says. “Sales are tracked in real time and can be downloaded and sent directly to distributors. It helps us be more precise and create real actionable items.”

(Photo courtesy GoSpotCheck)

Specifically, a sales rep checks into an account location with GoSpotCheck, and then is prompted with a series of easily answered questions or tasks created by a manager. Typical questions could include: “Is our IPA on tap?” “Are the tap handles up to date?” “Is there a tin tacker or neon?” “Is our cold placement ideal?” “How many cases are on display?”

The answers are shared with the manager immediately, so that person can then remotely engage, if needed, in the account visit with the sales rep. The “real-time” aspect of the app keeps sales reps on task as well.

“Our mantra is what gets measured, get improved,” says Matt Talbot, GoSpotCheck founder and CEO. “Our program enables a manager to build surveys and push them out into the field for those who are there. Then they can collect and slice and analyze the data. We want to make sure we’re not only helping people collect data, but we’re ensuring it’s insightful and creates meaningful action.”

As sales teams, operations teams, and merchandisers use the app, they customize it to their own brewery’s marketing and reach. GoSpotCheck can be used for teams as small (or smaller) as that of a local brewery or as large as a multi-national brand.

“Larger brands can have thousands of reps in the field, while High Water has four,” Talbot says. “We believe that every worker being armed with basically a connected computer (in the form of a smartphone) is one of the most powerful things to happen to business process improvement. We want to make sure we’re helping businesses capitalize on that.”

In addition to the obvious questions relating to a typical sales call, managers can ask prosaic ones that promote brand and relationship building: “Did you tell the backstory of our IPA?” or “Did you mention our head brewer’s love for this restaurant’s pizza?”

GoSpotCheck’s goals include helping reps be more efficient. Making data easy to enter and to access saves time, in turn freeing time for reps to spend on face-to-face relationships instead of being bogged down by administrative tasks.

“The real-time tracking aspect allows for a much quicker turnaround,” Peasley says. “I like the way GoSpotCheck creates sales calls on the fly. It’s much more user friendly than most other sales trackers on the market.”

(Photo courtesy GoSpotCheck)

GoSpotCheck even enables reps to monitor and track their competitor’s placements and pricing. Users can take photos of either their own or their competitors’ displays to share with managers and keep as a record for future negotiations.

Founded in 2011, GoSpotCheck initially was a crowdsourced mobile app that could conduct audits and surveys for brands. Soon it morphed into a way to help brands collect the data that they really care about–such as real-time market analysis. All of this in an efficient, intuitive app.

“When you’re out in the field doing an experiential event, or even just calling on on- or off-premise accounts, you’re on the go and you don’t want to be using something that’s clunky and hard to understand,” Talbot notes. “We really made sure that we are thinking a lot about the field user first and foremost. How do we make it very, very easy for them to actually complete these types of reports on the go without a tremendous amount of headache associated with doing that reporting.”